


If Pain Must Come

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Awkward Conversations, F/M, I love my beta, Phoebe is a bitch, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 17:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13172031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: Chakotay seeks out the help of a reluctant messenger. A study in an awkward conversation, and righting all the wrongs of Endgame.





	If Pain Must Come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiaCooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/gifts).



> For my wonderful beta Mia Cooper. She gave me a gift, and taught me how to spell Phoebe, so this is my poor attempt at a reciprocation. 
> 
> As a result, it is unbeta'd so all mistakes I lay claim to and ask that if you see a glaring one, you let me know.

* * *

“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.” **\- Paul Coelho**

* * *

 

The winter is fast approaching, and it envelops San Francisco in an opaque, white fog that climbs across his building and shudders bone deep with cold.

He despises it.

His apartment – a small, upper  corner of an old cold-water on Rose Street that juts out so he can see the Bay and the Academy from his massive windows – is warm though, the steam rising to coat the glass in their own fog. He bends over the recipe he’s set out, then examines the content of the steel pot simmering in front of him.

It’s a practical, simple pleasure to do this – to cook, over a stove, with no constraints, no red-alerts, no anomalies. But then, of course, he misses them as equally as he is glad of their absence. He’s a character of contradictions. He stretches out, reaches for the wine he’s set out to breathe, and pours himself a steadying glass. He takes a larger than necessary gulp and sets it down beside the chopping board.

He goes back into the sitting room; small, homely, the only place he can relax now. He organises the photographs on the mantle, straightens the sculpture he took from his own quarters, then moves to the bookcase. He strokes his fingers over the spines of the books he’s collected. This fresh desire to collect is, he knows, a desire to feel close to her - to recognise the need for the physical touch of something from another world.

The comm bleeps, shattering the quiet of the apartment, and he already knows.

His head dips forward, chin pressed to his chest, and his fingers pulse and curl into his palms.

He opens the screen, flicking it hard with his fingers so it bounces fully upright.

The face of her Aide appears.

“The admiral won’t –“

“Let me guess,” he says to the face on the screen, “she can’t make it.”

“No sir,” he affirms, face stoic.

Chakotay, rude as he knows it is, slams the console closed without even acknowledging the ensign’s answer.

If it used to be anger, now it’s something far deeper than that - skimming a thin line between despondency and fury.

He sulks into the kitchen, empties the simmering pans into the bin, pours the wine down the drain, and switches off the lights.

 

**-0-**

 

He’d expected her to look radically different, so it comes as a shock to him when he scans the café to find someone who looks like a slightly younger, rounder version. She’s sitting, so he can’t tell if she’s as small, but what he does know almost instantly is that her character fills the space around her. It emanates in an almost haze, and he feels instantly intimidated - so nothing particularly novel there.

She stands as he approaches, and she’s as small as he suspected. Unlike her older sister, she opens her arms wide and throws them around his locked arms.

“Come on,” she laughs – low, incisive, just on the right side of inappropriate – “she talks about you so much I feel like I know you anyway.”

This is a surprise because he hardly imagined she talked about him at all. He believes himself to be a wisp of a memory now, a mistake hovering on the periphery of the seven years she spent trying not to make him a mistake.

“Phoebe,” he says, stepping back, “can I get you a coffee?”

“Unlike my older sister, I don’t drink it like water. But, yeah, coffee would be nice.”

He signals the waiter and orders tea for himself and coffee, black, for Phoebe, and then they look at each other for a quiet moment before she asks:

“Why did you want to meet me?”

He realises now that he’s clumsily led himself into this without thinking. In a fit of desperation he’d looked her up – publically listed because she’s an artist – and commed her and said he needed to talk. The issue, of course, is that he lost the ability to talk candidly about this particular subject galaxies ago.

He fiddles with his ear, his fingers hovering over his face nervously.

“I take it this is about my sister,” she offers, though it’s not out of kindness.

Instead it’s the same morbid curiosity for knowledge, whether it hurts or not, that he’s noted in her sister, which drives the woman in front of him to ask. It should get his hackles up, because there’s something a little inhumane about it, but it only makes him feel slightly more comfortable.

“Yes,” he nods. “It is.”

“Well, I’d say I have all day to talk about the wonders of the Federation’s latest poster girl, but I don’t. So shoot,” she lifts her cup as it’s delivered to the table and sits back.

He’s not imagining the slightly bitter flavour to her words. There’s humour, and a little peevishness in them, but there’s also something which sounds like jealousy.

“I don’t know…” he shrugs, feeling hugely inadequate in the face of her bluntness. “I-“

Her face softens and he sees pity painted plainly in her features. He doesn’t want her pity, but he isn’t exactly sure what else he wants instead.

“Chakotay,” she sits forward, “My sister doesn’t want to see you.”

The lassitude that’s been building in him settles like a weight in his stomach, unable to fend off her words as they act as a blow to his heart. He doesn’t need to hear them – he knows – but she says them because she’s as blunt as her sister, and just a little bit cruel.

He shrugs.

Phoebe takes pity on him then.

“You’re dating her pet Borg.”

Where Kathryn cares deeply for gracious language and inoffensive terms – at least in public – it seems her sister takes great pleasure in them.

“What?”

“She is cut to the bone– that you’re screwing Seven. Do I need to explain it more?”

He feels a little blindsided, and words escape him.

“It isn’t true.”

She smirks, “Sure it isn’t.”

He clenches his fists, hidden under the table, and then loosens them out.

"I'm not."

"Well that isn't what Katie believes," she shrugs. "And heaven knows she doesn't take kindly to being scrapped for a hot half-robot."

He bristles at the insult on behalf of Seven. He cares for her, deeply, and he doesn't like that she's been reduced to her physical appearance. It's not that he doesn't understand it either. He's also acutely aware that his liaison with Seven was a mistake.

"You know your sister made it abundantly clear that there was no chance for us while we were in a command structure?"

Fury hardens his voice, and Phoebe's grin irritates him further.

"Temper," she sits back. "Well my sister seems to think there was a chance, and you threw it away." 

He drums his fingers on the table, watches the steam curl upwards from his tea into blue swirls in the space between them. It reminds him of the Kolinar Kolinar, and he wonders if that's where the cracks began to spread, and he knows he wasn't big enough to contain them.

"She isn't the only victim."

The bite in his own words, the spontaneity of them, shock him. 

Phoebe grins, lopsided and enigmatic: "Kathryn is never a victim."

He feels his own ire rush from him, and the sudden futility of this endeavour strikes him between the ribs, leaving him breathless and embarrassed. 

"I don't know what I hoped to achieve," he admits, leaving it unuttered as a fact between them that Phoebe is as equally hard to interpret as her sibling.  He doesn't know that she really cares, about Kathryn and certainly not about him, or if its morbid curiosity that has found her here on a Saturday afternoon. He doesn't even know if she's even close to her sister. 

"Nor do I," Phoebe agrees. "My sister is hurt, and that is never a good start. She is like a wounded animal when she's hurt, she attacks. And if the man I'd loved-"

She immediately stops, and the words remain suspended in mid-air, orbiting with his own horror and humiliation, in front of them. It's the first time that word has ever surfaced, in all its reality, before. Not once did it makes itself plain in the seven years they were stranded, and yet here it is, thrown carelessly into the atmosphere of a coffee shop by a reluctant messenger.

He blinks a few times, trying to clear his own confusion. 

"Oh fuck it," Phoebe mutters. "If the man I'd loved had decided to trade me in for what is essentially my surrogate daughter, I'd be pissed at him too. It's a bit careless, don't you think?"

He can't believe it's as simple as that, he doesn't want to. He doesn't think that's all it is, or maybe his fragile pride can't think it. It's more than that: it's Kashyk, and Valerie Archer, and Rudy Ransom, and the silence they bred and grew and nurtured like a child who was a mistake. 

"I don't believe that's all it is," he says. "She knows me. And she knows the lines we had drawn. The lines _she_ had drawn."

Phoebe smirks, "Didn't stop you trying to blur them."

 _Or her_ balances on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows it.

Phoebe's shoulders sag, and for a moment sincerity floods onto her face, "I'm being unfair on you." She says softly. "I am angry at you, because I've never quite seen my sister drag her heels getting over someone, the way she's dragging them over you. And she's changed."

"That wasn't just me," he whispers. "Everything, out there..."

"Oh I know," she agrees, and they look at each other and he knows she knows much more than she probably should. Classified things, things Kathryn would only share after a bottle of wine loosens her tongue. He wonders if she cried. He hopes she did, that she found some sort of catharsis.

"But she thought she had you to look forward to when you came home. I think she's done with broken promises."

So is he. He's done with broken promises too. 

"I love her." He stands, pulls on his jacket. 

Phoebe watches him closely, measuring him.

"And we both have amends to make. But you have to tell her I love her. Maybe that's what I was hoping to achieve after all."

 

 

**-0-**

The winter is making him miserable, the cold eating into his bones, and so he books a ticket to the Gulf of Mexico, and hires a secluded villa on a deserted strip of beach. 

He emerges one morning, after a bright and sudden dawn, and after a swim in the sea. 

It's been a week since he uttered those words, and now he's laid them to rest. He feels a peace he didn't before. In their being voiced, they don't feel as big as they did. 

He loved her. He loves her still. And it's alright if that's the only thing he can ever do. 

She is sitting in the small porch which juts out into the sand, from the villa. He pauses for a moment, frightened she's an apparition, because she certainly seems like a ghost from a pained past.

She looks very different: toned, much leaner than she already was, hair growing and moving with the gentle breeze.  She looks like the first few years of their journey together. 

He stops a few metres from her.

She doesn't stand, she remains seated, legs crossed, hands betraying her as they twist in her lap. She stares out into the new sun, reds and oranges painting her pale skin, reminding him of the taste of her. 

"It wasn't just Seven," she says softly, eyes still averted. "It was lots of things."

"I know."

They are silent for a moment.

"How can you love something – someone -  that's broken?"

He steps nearer.

"Because everything is fixable," he touches her shoulder, and she does not flinch. 

She rests her cheek against his hand, and he feels the warmth of her breath.

"I am sorry I hurt you," he says sincerely, pulling her up by the hands and against his body. 

"No more than I hurt myself," she whispers into the crook of his neck. 

He buries his face in her hair, holds her so close he cannot imagine what it felt like not to hold her. 

"I didn't know how to reach you," he explains. "I didn't know what to say anymore."

She pulls her head up, and she's smiling. 

"You picked a succinct messenger."

He actually laughs, a real, full laugh. It feels good.

"She's a hard woman to impress," he scoops her up, and she wraps her legs around his waist. 

"You shouldn't really be concerned about impressing anyone but me right now," she laughs, and he kicks open the door with one foot.

"Tell me you love me, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to impress you."

She kisses his cheeks, his jaw, his ear, finally his mouth, as he tries to navigate them towards the bed with an increasingly uncomfortable towel around his waist and the woman he has loved for nearly a decade saying unspeakably seductive things into his ear.

"Enough of that," he places her down gently and stalls her hands as they pull at the towel. "Say it."

She stops everything, including time, and in that moment it is only them and they are all that matters - they are all that has ever mattered.

She takes his face between her small, powerful hands, and her eyes are so sincere he might weep.

"I love you."

 


End file.
